An incredible story of determination, creativity and digital ingenuity comes from the province of Varese. Davide Fariolia boy alone 12 years resident in Tradate, achieved an unprecedented feat in the famous video game Minecraft: build a gigantic metropolis by yourself inspired by the urban landscapes of the United States, particularly Manhattan in New York and Buffalo.
Stacking around 500,000 virtual blocks at the controls of his Nintendo Switch console, the work develops from the X coordinate -250000 to the X coordinate +250000. An imposing size which, if brought into reality, would occupy a space equal to 500 linear kilometersextending as long as the distance from Milan to Rome and as wide as the distance between Milan and Turin.
@File photo Alexander Kovalev/Pexels
Ten thousand hours of gameplay in Survival mode without cheats or mods
What makes Davide’s challenge monumental is the choice of play entirely in Survival mode, without resorting to cheats, easy controls or mods. Unlike Creative mode, where the materials are infinite and a building is erected in 20 minutes, in Survival you need to procure every single block from scratch, taking over one hour for each structure.
To complete the work, created during a winter afternoon between 2024 and 2025 after watching a gameplay video by YouTuber Gabby16bit, they served well 10,000 hours of gameplay spread over a year and a half. Davide has recreated not only the external facades of skyscrapers, houses, shops, a shopping centre, a bank, a Brooklyn-style bridge and round fountains, but has completely furnished all the internal rooms.
The technical solutions for the console and the candidacy for the Guinness Book of Records
To complete the project by overcoming the hardware limitations of the Nintendo Switch, Davide had to find ingenious solutions. To avoid system slowdowns, it has excavated specific areas of the original mapreplacing the pre-existing blocks with their own buildings and creating a detailed police station as a more complex structure. Proud of his journey, his mother Serena highlighted the extraordinary autonomy of her son, who personally forwarded the message official candidacy of his metropolis to the Guinness World Records.
Grades at school, passions and the dream of the Burj Khalifa
Despite the time dedicated to the screen, Davide manages his school commitments successfully by quickly finishing his daily homework. Among his next challenges is already the faithful reproduction of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world, of which he wants to furnish every single floor. Despite demonstrating an uncommon talent in digital architecture and Lego bricks, the very young creator maintains clear ideas about his professional future: when he grows up he doesn’t intend to be an architect, but dreams of becoming an airline pilot or a computer programmer.
